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Welcome to the Application Performance Management Blog, where you can read the perspectives from APM experts. This Blog provides insights into the Application Performance Management solution, as well as technical details about specific IBM products.

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The Move Towards the Cloud is Creating Different Monitoring Needs For the Cloud Provider and the Cloud Consumer

As IT infrastructures evolve, we are seeing a rapid shift towards cloud environments. This is creating the need for companies to look at different approaches for monitoring their environments. All systems that are deployed for infrastructure and business applications are centrally controlled, well known to the IT management teams, and fairly static. This makes application monitoring a relatively straightforward task. Deploy the appropriate monitoring for each business application and infrastructure component based on criticality to the business. In addition, many of the tools and data needed by the IT infrastructure management team are the same tools needed by the application owners. Application development teams may need an additional level of depth and granularity to the metrics, but many of the same tools can be utilized across multiple teams.

As workloads move to the cloud the needs of the business change. The movement to cloud creates two very distinct sets of monitoring needs. The owner of the cloud infrastructure has to ensure that the cloud infrastructure is health and performing well, while the consumer of the cloud has the need for application monitoring and monitoring their business services. These two very different consumers of monitoring data drive a different set of requirements.

The cloud provider needs deep monitoring data to ensure that the cloud infrastructure is up and running and healthy. Monitoring data includes monitoring of the hypervisor and the hypervisor specific bottlenecks. It is critical to monitor the network and backend storage in addition to the hypervisor. In addition, capacity planning becomes a critical capability as more and more tenants are added into the cloud. The cloud owner must be able to anticipate future workloads including growth, but more importantly anticipate peaks in the workload for the business applications. The cloud might be hosting applications from many different industries and each may have a different peak usage period. It is essential to have a capacity planning tool that allows for what-if analysis and the use of long term historical data to ensure that future capacity needs are met.

The cloud consumer has a very different set of needs. The consumer doesn't need to worry about the infrastructure. Light weight application monitoring is the norm for a cloud environment. Given that new virtual machines can be provisioned if application performance slows down, the need to do deep analysis on a specific virtual machine is diminished.

Many customers want an independent way of verifying that they are getting the resources that they are paying for. This creates the need for an inexpensive and lightweight application monitoring solution that can be utilized to monitor the virtual machines. Key monitoring includes operating systems, application response time, and lightweight monitoring of middleware.

As I've described, the needs of the cloud consumer and the cloud provider are quite different. As more and more customers move their workloads into the cloud, the need for different tools becomes more and more important. For an internal cloud, look for tools that leverage the same data collector so that metrics are not collected multiple times on the same virtual machine. By finding the right tool to meet their needs, both the cloud provider and the cloud consumer can ensure that infrastructure, business applications, and SLAs are being met.

IBM has a new solution that is available, but is also being enhanced. This solution is intended for the cloud consumer to help them solve their application monitoring problems. The next release of the product is in BETA if you are interested in downloading the code and providing us feedback.